Josh Williams has a story that anyone building the future of artificial intelligence might want to pay attention to.

A visual-effects student at Bournemouth University in the U.K., Williams always wanted to make movies but kept slamming into the same walls: time, money and the sheer scale of what he imagined. Then he discovered AI — and suddenly those walls fell away.

The result is Ghost Lap, a sleek, F1-inspired short about a young driver haunted by his past, and the film earned Williams the Jury Prize at the Kling AI NextGen Creative Contest on Oct. 30.

“I began by creating my script and then eventually went to storyboarding and creating my color palette. [They were] experiments with all these different tools, so many new tools come out there so quickly,” said Williams, after accepting his award. “So I want to thank all the innovators out there who are just building these great tools and building at such a rapid pace that sometimes I can’t even keep up with. It’s really driving filmmaking and how people see the world — and connecting everyone, from all different cultures — into one place where, even with limited budgets, limited teams, limited actors, we can all get our voices out there, which is just so incredible.”

The Kling AI technology Williams turned to has been developed by Kuaishou Technology and has featured recently at both the Tokyo International Film Festival and, before that MIPCOM, as the Beijing-based company continues to explore international markets.

“The key benefits we see our technology contributing to our clients is, No. 1, it’s driving the cost down,” says Zeng Yushen, head of operations at Kling AI. “No. 2, it’s improving the time efficiency. What’s usually been done maybe in three months can now be done in a week. No. 3, very importantly, is that we are also expanding creative freedom.”

Kuaishou Technology began developing GIF-creation tools in 2011 before launching a short video and livestreaming app — called Kuaishou — in 2013. It then developed the video generation model Kling AI 1.0 and launched in June 2024, with almost monthly updates since. The Kling AI 2.5 Turbo Video model was rolled out in September “with enhanced performance in generating highly dynamic scenes, prompt adherence and upgraded aesthetics and cinematic quality.”

According to figures supplied by Kuaishou Technology, revenue from Kling AI topped RMB250 million ($30 million) for this year’s second quarter — up from Q1’s RMB 150 million ($21 million) — while its global user base has topped 45 million. Of that number, “prosumers” — professional creators like video editors and marketers — made up about 70 percent of revenue. The rest came from companies using Kling’s technology behind the scenes, paying for each automated request their systems make to the platform. The end result has been “200 million videos and 400 million images.”

“We’ve seen a lot of individual users leveraging our tool,” says Zeng. “Then, at the same time, we also serve enterprise clients across many different fields — filmmaking, entertainment, obviously, but also gaming, for use on smart devices, and also advertisements. These are the core user segmentations that we are serving right now.”

And while those enterprise partnerships are growing fast, Zeng says the heart of Kling’s momentum still comes from its everyday creators: “For individual subscription users, most of them come from design or creative backgrounds, and then they learn to use the tool so well that they can monetize the AI-generated content. They do advertisements, they create their own social media handles via AI to grow their fan base, they’re now making short films.”

The company’s strategic collaborations include the Kuaishou Astral Short Plays initiative, an AI-generated anthology series that has amassed around 200 million global views. Academy Award winner Timmy Yip (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Cannes lifetime achievement honoree Jia Zhangke were among the creators behind its nine AI-driven shorts released in 2024. Kling AI has also been used by the mobile game Sword of Justice to produce image-generated videos and interactive special effects.

Yip — who served on the NextGen Creative Contest jury — reflected common global concerns when he called for “the human touch in AI films,” according to Zeng.

“It’s absolutely a tool, not a replacement,” says Zeng, who likens the impact of AI to the rapid development of CGI back in the late 1980s. “I think that’s what we are seeing now. AI is a creative partner, and the key is still the characters, the story that the creator wants to share.”

Amazon Prime’s biblical epic House of David is another production to incorporate Kling Ai into its filming process, with its creator, Jon Erwin, also referencing cost and time as driving factors behind his decision to lean on the technology.

“The production team shared how it just wouldn’t be possible without the AI tools they use, with all those fantasy, epic style scenes,” says Zeng. “A 700-person production team was assembled because of the project. I think right now people tend to see just one side of the story, but actually with AI more projects are possible, and more people could be hired. There are a lot of positive stories that are happening every day.”

Another concern about the rapidly developing technology has been possible infringements on IP.
“We take copyright and intellectual property IP issues very seriously,” says Zeng. “We are really committed to making sure that our data is ethically sourced. Additionally, we provide our users with very clear guidelines in terms of use. We also outline the proper and legal ways to use AI-generated content. We also help our customers understand how to leverage the technology in a way that respects copyright laws and IP rights.”

Animator Wang Momo from Illumination Entertainment — creator of Tuzki, the widely used line-drawn rabbit emoji character — was also a judge of the NextGen Creative Contest, and says the entries she saw convinced her AI was helping develop a “new language of storytelling.”

Says Momo: “AI is transforming how we tell stories, and contests like this can definitely prove that technology can amplify human creativity rather than replace it.”